Only 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol, a record low. A new poll shows what's behind the decline.
Gallup has been tracking Americans' drinking behavior since 1939. Here's what a recent survey found.
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I'm gonna be honest. I need to do a lot more reading because I'm just more confused about alcohol consumption now.
I'd really like to better understand the direct health effects, like cancer mentioned in this article with low or moderate consumption.
"There is no safe level of alcohol consumption" isn't the most helpful piece of information. A lot of things we consume aren't completely safe. Whether it be carcinogens, red meat, or microplastics, we are always ingesting things that have both negative and positive effects.
Life is about managing risks. Eating fatty or high caloric foods, affects us a whole lot differently than eating whole foods, vegetables, and low carbs. Alcohol is just another item on the list of risks to manage.
How does low to moderate alcohol consumption compare to the risks associated with all the other sources of consumption?
🤔
"There is no safe level of alcohol consumption" isn't the most helpful piece of information.
It’s mostly to bust the myth that there’s some level of alcohol consumption that’s actually beneficial for the health. You should never pretend that alcohol is good for your health.
Yeah, I certainly agree with this is probably the most helpful thing from the article. I've never pretended that it can be healthy, but I know that's important to a lot of people.
While that may be true, there are plenty of instances where alcohol consumption is better than drinking water. Drink wine to avoid ringworms type shit.
Tapeworm? Ringworm is a fungal skin infection.
Yes I got them mixed up. Both are pretty much not present in my region.
I’m no doctor but I’m gonna guess there’s like … actual medicine you can take for that instead of using alcohol as a method of treatment
Sounds like something someone with parasites would say. 🤔
It's technically preventative, also its more a historical issue. Basically a lot of water sources were contaminated with parasites, metals, and just general nastiness which resulted in people using juice, wine, and beer as a replacement. This cultural element lost a lot of pressure towards the end of the 1800s going into the 1900s and was even an element of prohibition the argument being that water was clean alcohol was no longer needed. Which is stupid but whatever.
Okaaay, suspect, but whatever. That's 1. What are the rest of the "plenty of instances where alcohol consumption is better than drinking water?"
Basically any instance where the water is contaminated and you don't have access to a filter. Boiling is tedious and only does so much.
For decades the line was that a glass or two of red wine had health benefits, but they were largely deriving that by comparing data to places like Italy, France, and Spain where wine consumption is normalized and they have other health factors.
Same stuff that started driving "The Mediterranean Diet".
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281
On further study though, it gets complicated:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10146095/
"Acute and short-term RW consumption seems to exert positive effects on antioxidant status, the lipid profile, thrombosis and inflammation markers, and the gut microbiota.
Importantly, a longer duration of treatment with RW has been shown to protect renal and cardiac function parameters in T2DM patients, suggesting that a moderate intake of RW may serve as a dietary supplement in diabetic patients.
On the other hand, blood pressure values, homocysteine levels, and gastrointestinal function seem to be impaired by short-term RW intake."
This is helpful.
Of course, it's focused on positive health benefits. I'm not actually looking to justify alcohol consumption as healthy. What I would honestly like to know is if it is proven to be unhealthy.
This article is the first time I've actually heard it associated with cancer risk. And that is with the presumption of frequent and excessive alcohol consumption.
I'm more concerned with low to moderate amounts and what the proven negative effects are. Is it worse than consuming red meat, carcinogen ingestion, microplastic congestion, and any number of other negative factors we ingest due to a bad diet (e.g. high cholesterol foods).
As far as I know, it's about on par. Light, infrequent drinking doesn't meaningfully increase your risk of disease any more than moderate consumption of red meat, for example. Frequent heavy drinking definitely does.
This is what I'd like to see some data on.
You should look up the correlation between alcohol consumption and cancer rates. It's pretty clear-cut; the graph goes down ever so slightly down* and then keeps on rising. The "safe" limit would just be a function of how high a probability of getting cancer you're willing to tolerate.
Medical issues are a common reason not to drink, so the cancer rate for the total non-drinking population is appreciably higher than it would be for a healthy non-drinking individual. There's no causation behind that drop to our knowledge.
PS: I said "cancer," but the same principle applies to liver failure and a host of other "fun" diseases.
If I can find it, I'd be curious about this.
I'm more concerned with low to moderate amounts and what the proven negative effects are. AND, is it worse than consuming red meat, carcinogen ingestion, microplastic congestion, and any number of other negative factors we ingest due to a bad diet (e.g. high cholesterol foods).
I have been following this subject for decades as I have spent most of the last 30 years selling booze.
You should think of it as like smoking weed more than eating a steak.
This makes sense. However, I'm not familiar with cannabis ingestion. I do know that smoking anything at all has increased negative risks.
I drink infrequently, but certainly more than I consume red meat. I might consume one steak a year, for example.
It's also so incredibly dependent on genetics that it's not even funny.
How are you defining "low to moderate"?
Mayo says:
If you already drink alcohol, do so in moderation. For healthy adults, that means:
- Up to one drink a day for women.
- Up to two drinks a day for men. The limit for men is higher because men most often weigh more than women and have more of the substance that breaks down alcohol in the body.
A drink is defined as:
- 12 ounces (355 milliliters) of regular beer.
- 5 ounces (148 milliliters) of wine.
- 1.5 ounces (44 milliliters) of hard liquor or distilled spirits.
Personally, I come nowhere near that. However, I'm still curious, at those levels or less, what the effects are.
Yeah, I generally take these kind of warnings with a grain of salt (which is yet another risk to manage). The studies are generally looking at usage levels far in excess of what I personally consume. It's pretty safe to say that with significantly lower usage you're also looking at significantly lower risk.
